Category: Philosophy/Religion

B.S. alert. If you’ve come for enlightenment, you’ve come to the wrong place.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Notes for an idiolecture

My one year-old niece refutes the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein on a daily basis. What do I mean by “refute”? In the Life of Samuel Johnson, Boswell famously describes how Johnson responded to the philosophical solipsism of George Berkeley:

After we came out of the church, we stood talking for some time together of Bishop Berkeley’s ingenious sophistry to prove the non-existence of matter, and that every thing in the universe is merely ideal. I observed, that though we are satisfied his doctrine is not true, it is impossible to refute it. I never shall forget the alacrity with which Johnson answered, striking his foot with mighty force against a large stone, till he rebounded from it, “I refute it thus.”

Though generations of Western philosophy students have derided this “refutation” as obtuse (see here, for example), I think they are the ones who are guilty of obtuseness for failing to appreciate the Zen-like adroitness of Dr. Johnson’s swift kick. Like a koan, it is best appreciated not as an isolated, universal statement, but as a spur-of-the-moment response to the student’s (Boswell’s) state of mind. They had just come out of the church, whose central drama reenacts the mystery of incarnation, however the bishop may try to resolve the paradox of Word-made-flesh. In Christianity, as in Buddhism, pain and suffering are awarded a quasi-ontological significance. The difference, I think, is that if Dr. Johnson had been a Zen master, he would’ve kicked Boswell; Christian charity dictated his choice of a stone scapegoat.

Buddhist philosophy includes a very Berkeleyan school called Vijñaptimí¢tra, “Representation-Only.” It was popular for a while in Tang- and Song-Dynasty China, and the Record of Master Yunmen (Ummon in Japanese) describes several instances where students question this most formidable of Zen teachers about it. Here’s one of them, in Urs App’s peerless annotated translation (#77):

Someone asked: “What is it like when [one realizes that] the three realms are nothing but mind, and the myriad things are merely [produced by one’s] cognition?”

The Master replied, “Hiding in one’s tongue.”

“And what is that like?”

The Master said, “Su-lu, su-lu.”

“This spell was among other things used for fending off evil spirits,” says App’s footnote to the last line. Thus can apparent nonsense be invested with a higher, non-symbolic sense.

My niece Elanor is what they call pre-verbal. But in fact she verbalizes constantly, and often quite loudly and insistently, accompanied by hand and head gestures. For example, last Friday afternoon she was sitting on her Grandpa’s lap while he read one of her favorite books to her. When he finished and closed the book, she turned it over, jabbed her right forefinger at the cover, looked him in the eye and let out a loud stream of syllables some ten seconds long, with falling intonation. We all laughed, and Grandpa read the book again.

I could relate many such incidents about her. A couple weeks ago, I did something to tease her – I forget just what. She got a stern look on her face and lectured me vociferously for a couple of minutes while everyone looked on. The gestural qualities of spoken language are evidently very appealing to her. Her mother gave her an old cell phone to play with, and she tells us that Elanor quite often holds it up to her ear and holds lengthy “conversations,” toddling back and forth from one end of their apartment to the other.

Her choice of syllables seems fairly arbitrary, though she gravitates toward some, such as dada and lalala, apparently because the sounds are agreeable to her ear. She has clearly grasped the link between speaking and self-assertion. At family gatherings, she often attempts to join in on supper-table conversations from where she sits like a potentate in her high chair. In her serenity and sovereignty, she brings to mind the Daodejing’s example of a (male) infant as the very embodiment of virtue or character (de). From the Ames and Hall translation, Chapter 55:

He screams through the entire day
And yet his voice does not get hoarse:
Such is height of harmony.

Though Elanor was never a screamer like that, I think it’s important to remember that her “pre-verbal” utterances and gestures are not an imperfect anticipation of “real,” systematic language. Rather, they constitute expressions of her state of mind closer to music or the songs of birds, which, though they rarely obey the laws of harmony, cannot fail to harmonize with the bird’s internal and external state, and thus sound pleasant to a third party.

In their commentary on Chapter 55, Ames and Hall make a point of some relevance to Johnson’s common sense-based “refutation” of representation-only:

The baby, unconsciously and without motivation, is the embodiment of harmony and equilibrium. Vitality, then, is sustaining this kind of balance in the rhythms of the day. Common sense – insight into the ordinary and everyday – is the relatively uncommon ability to maximize one’s quantum of life-energy by using it up in a measured way, remaining ever responsive to the cadence of one’s experience.

How does this refute Wittgenstein?

Wittgenstein, as you may recall, was anointed by Time magazine as the most important philosopher of the 20th century. He was a very serious man who liked to number his thoughts, and tried to give them an air of cohesion and importance by grouping some of them under a grand, Latin title – a practice which the author of this website heartily deplores. But it’s his later work, collected posthumously as Philosophical Investigations, that I want to call attention to here. As the Wikipedia article points out, this work permits a variety of interpretations. According to one of them, Wittgenstein maintained that “everyday language functions for the most part unproblematically and does not require correction by philosophers.”

Well and good! But it’s one of Wittgenstein’s subsidiary arguments – his famous digression about the possibility of a private language – that I think my niece’s behavior refutes. A private language is one in which “The words … are to refer to what can be known only to the speaker; to his immediate, private, sensations. So another cannot understand the language.”

This translation is from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, which goes on to explain that

This is not intended to cover (easily imaginable) cases of recording one’s experiences in a personal code, for such a code, however obscure in fact, could in principle be deciphered. What Wittgenstein had in mind is a language conceived as necessarily comprehensible only to its single originator because the things which define its vocabulary are necessarily inaccessible to others.

Immediately after introducing the idea, Wittgenstein goes on to argue that there cannot be such a language. The importance of drawing philosophers’ attention to a largely unheard-of notion and then arguing that it is unrealizable lies in the fact that an unformulated reliance on the possibility of a private language is arguably essential to mainstream epistemology, philosophy of mind and metaphysics from Descartes to versions of the representational theory of mind which became prominent in late twentieth century cognitive science. […]

[S]uch a so-called language would, necessarily, be unintelligible to its supposed originator too, for he would be unable to establish meanings for its putative signs.

You can click on the link and read about the debate Wittgenstein’s cryptic statements engendered if you wish. To me, the entire argument is flawed by the assumption that language is, at root, an intelligible system of signs – rather than, say, an endless flow of sounds and gestures, sense and nonsense, a river that constantly reshapes its bed. The earliest human language, like the languages of many non-human animals, has not yet become narrowed into the channel of representation-only, but floods and rushes wherever the questing mind wills. Its reach regularly exceeds its grasp, as the semiotically naive mind seeks intimate involvement in a world rich in numinous energy. Only at rare moments of great intensity in our adult lives are we reminded that what we call “meaning” was once pure gestalt.

The other thing I forgot to tell you about my niece is that she regularly interrupts whatever she is saying and doing to seek out physical contact with the nearest adult. A brief hug every five minutes or so seems to provide a kind of fuel for her explorations. And of course there’s no fooling a small child: any falsehood during such contacts would be detected almost immediately. It is on this template that the shared, “common sense” truth-assumptions of all social languages are built, I think. Soon enough, an escalating addiction to such physical/emotional response will lead to the standardization of her private language and its assimilation into the narrower but more powerful linguistic currents of her social milieu. Her favorite, all-purpose syllables dada will become less Dada and more Dad. Nonsense will become increasingly uncommon as she strives to make a commoner kind of sense. With time and luck, she may come to compete with her father or uncle for the title of fastest bullslinger in the West.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

The hole in the lawn

Sleep is finished with me before I am finished with sleep. Isn’t that just typical? I pick up the book I was looking at last night before my eyelids grew heavy, and notice that the words have burned little bare marks in the page’s snow. The sun that shines on the other side of the earth must’ve shone here, too, breaking through leaden clouds. And me lying unconscious all the while, my mind diverting itself with silent movies, with lantern slides. I woke at 1:00 and shuffled into the bathroom, trying to hold on to whatever I had just been dreaming about, so that I might remember it in the morning, but I ended up focusing instead on my effort to focus. Can the motion of the will ever take the place of genuine knowledge? I don’t mean that irritable reaching after fact and reason that Keats maligned, but the shoeless standing-in-the-presence-of, the empty-handed having-without-holding.

Before returning to my book this morning, though, I have to indulge my habit of sitting outside in the dark, where everything happens in the usual minor key: the water gurgling in the ditch, the wind blowing, the faint noise of the highway from over the ridge. A dusting of new snow makes the darkness visible. Usually around this time I get to hear and faintly see the porcupine making his way home to his burrow, but this morning he surprises me, emerging from under the porch and shuffling across the yard toward his favorite elm.

I had just been thinking about the silliness of so many contemporary writers, their sleight-of-hand substitution of pretend epiphanies for a postmodernist relativism. But we live in a culture of the climax, don’t we? The writers are no different from the sex addicts or the ravers, who are simply the most open about what almost everyone has been conditioned to desire: an endless and irreversible peak experience that we can suckle on like a child’s pacifier. What good is God or enlightenment if it can’t be known the way Adam knew Eve, if you can’t see it, touch it, dwell in it until ecstasy becomes your second nature and that prickly neurotic fellow who had usurped your good name is banished to the outer darkness? Until one day when a true ex-stasis occurs – and it is simply jarring or disorienting, not at all euphorogenic. Maybe you are beside yourself with grief, to the point where you treasure every dull glimmer of ordinary life the way someone shipwrecked on a desert island might make a collection of what, under other circumstances, he would regard as so much trash.

A porcupine leaves little pieces of itself here and there throughout the woods; if the quills didn’t come out easily, what good would they be? One afternoon last October, I was walking along one of our old woods roads with my head down, woolgathering as usual, when a small clump of porcupine needles caught my eye. I knelt down to examine them, as if I were a tracker or something. I heard a slight rustle behind me and turned. There right on the other side of the trail was the porcupine himself, or herself. S/he then turned her back to me and raised her quills, in the process showing me her pale butt. Then chattering her teeth she moved slowly off through the woods.

This obviously wasn’t an epiphany in any normal sense of the world. I didn’t come away with any profound new understanding of anything, though I was grateful for such a direct, even rude challenge to my normal self-centeredness. Like many wildlife encounters, it was humbling and a little unsettling – not exactly what most people mean by a peak experience.

So this morning the porcupine comes out right when I am expecting him to go in. On his way to the elm, he blunders into the little circle of fencing I put up last spring to protect a volunteer apple seedling. He circles the fence, then pauses over a shallow hole in the middle of the lawn where one can hear the stream flowing under four feet of rocky fill. What’s he doing, I wonder? It’s too dark to tell. He stays motionless there for more than a minute as if listening, as if trying to recall.

***

Just as I finish writing the above paragraphs, my mom walks in the door. “Hey, you want a good picture? There’s a young porcupine down in the hollow, in the big hemlock tree right before you get to the Waterthrush Bench.”

Half an hour later, it’s still there, chewing away. It doesn’t seem to be in any hurry.

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Posted on by Dave Bonta

My Zen

Never mind Fuketsu’s Zen. If you want to express the truth, throw out your words, throw out your silence, and tell me about your own Zen.
– Mumonkan

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My Zen is a joke.

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My Zen walks like a duck and quacks like a duck.

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My Zen does not pass Go.

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My Zen is all heart, baby!

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My Zen looks for enlightenment in all the wrong places.

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My Zen has a celebrity endorsement from Jack Shit.

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My Zen is no joke.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

What is the via negativa?

Beth knows.

***

In other news, qarrtsiluni inaugurates a new theme, “Lies and Hiding,” with a poem about the vagaries of history by Maria Benet, which seems to reflect her own history as an Romanian immigrant. I guess it’s O.K. with poetry to give away the ending:

You are packed:
the clothes of your new life
folded and stashed in your mind–and again you rehearse:
the border, customs, forms
to fill. Again you write:
nothing to declare,
nothing worth currency.

Dick Jones shares two wonderful poems based on his travels in the Ural Mountains between 1989 and 2000. “BIRDS ON THE CHUSOVAYA RIVER” begins:

High flat sun, sour light
draining like whey
through muslin cloud.
This bird’s geometry — square-winged,
turning on the axis
of its hunger, reorders
the sky. The berkut, summer eagle,
sideslips into the treeline.

SB compiles some recent good news for internet addicts and writers of poetry. I particularly liked this quote (from the Independent): “Poetry, it seems, is not the new rock’n’roll, but the new Prozac.” (Fortunately, the author of the article is considerably wiser than this may suggest, and comes down rather hard on the notion that the best thing about poetry is that it might be good for you.)

Finally, Tom Montag‘s Morning Drive Journal feature helps remind me what a real winter might be like. This is how it was in Fairwater, Wisconsin on February 1, 2000:

It’s a lovely winter morning. A cold nip to the wind, partly cloudy, the sun hidden, a greyness. No frost on the windshield of the pick-up. I can see my breath in the air. A stillness, as if winter holds its breath, then the branch of a bush moves and the spell is broken. Clouds are smears to the north and east and west, haze above. If we could cup the day in our hand like water, what would it look like?

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Why I love the Old Testament

These generalizations about the Tanakh – its proper name – don’t quite hold for the latest books, Ezekiel and especially Daniel, which betray a great deal of Iranian influence and thus should really be classed more with the intertestamental apocrypha and pseudepigrapha. NOTE: This is a draft post, subject to further refinement. These reasons are basically all right off the top of my head – the kind of things I would tell you if we were sitting down to coffee, and you happened to ask me how the heck a professed anarchist like me can love the Bible.

1. It does not depict a creation ex nihilo, but opens (pace the usual translations), “When God was beginning to create the heavens and the earth…” God creates as a sculpter does, day by day uncovering an emergent order from the primordial wilderness (see 15, below).

2. It contains no theology (aside from God’s teasing statement to Moses in Exodus 3:14, the sense of which is “I will be whoever the hell I want!”).

3. It is not entirely monotheistic, alluding in a few places to other gods (e.g. Psalm 82); depicting Yahweh as having divine offspring and/or representatives (“angels”); and suggesting a multiple nature for divinity itself with Yahweh’s frequent alternate name Elohim, which is a plural form. (Adonai is also a plural form, but this “is usually construed as a respectful, and not a syntactic plural,” whereas “it is argued that the word elohim had an origin in a plural grammatical form.” See the Wikipedia article Names of God in Judaism for further discussion of the way different names reflect different aspects or personalities of divinity.)

4. Its Yahweh is not incorporeal, all-good, or all-wise, and in some stories resembles an amoral trickster deity similar to the Norse Loki, the Yoruba Eshu or the Maidu Coyote. Yahweh kicks ass.

5. It is free of the poisonous influence of radical dualism (good and evil – or matter and spirit – as wholly separate, mutually exclusive categories). The problem of evil is raised but not “solved.”

6. The destiny of the individual soul after death is alluded to, but nowhere treated as a matter of consequence.

7. The language is direct, rhythmic and repetitious in the manner of the best oral epic. The graceful language and vivid imagery recall poetry more than prose.

8. It is full of analogic thinking and creative leaps, such as “Man is born to trouble, as the sparks fly upward” or “As the crackling of thorns under a pot, so is the laughter of fools.”

9. So-called “Biblical parallelism” extends from the level of the verse to the overall organization (alternate tellings of the same story, even alternate histories – e.g. Judges-Kings vs. Chronicles), teaching a tolerance for alternative interpretations.

10. For every passage that seems hateful and exclusive, there’s a passage that’s accepting and inclusive.

11. Hints of an earlier matriarchal order abound, and despite the overwhelming patriarchal emphasis, there are more strong female characters than in any comparable work from antiquity. In Proverbs, Wisdom is allegorized as a woman. By way of comparison, Zhuangzi, my other favorite anthology of sacred literature, contains virtually no references to women.

12. The Saul-David cycle has a depth of psychological realism worthy of the greatest novels. In general, Biblical characters are three-dimensional, flawed beings.

13. No one has ever written a book on The Plants of the Prajnaparamita Sutra.

14. Human beings are consistently depicted as a very small and weak part of an overwhelmingly large universe, and become guilty of the worst kind of impiety if they start to believe otherwise.

15. Desert or wilderness (tohu) is portrayed as part of a separate order that in some sense (as the tohu-wa-bohu of Genesis 1:2) predates and gives rise to Creation; thus, it is a place of testing and renewal (for Jacob/Israel, David, Elijah, etc.) and an image almost of Emptiness in the Buddhist sense.

16. Even as captured and subverted by end-time and Messianic theologies (including Christianity), its literary richness and depth of ambiguity has provided a much-needed moderating influence on radical movements, from the hey-day of gnosticism, through the Scholastics and Kabbalists, down to the Inquisition (which is, in one form or another, on-going).

17. It spawned two translations (the King James Version and, I gather, Martin Luther’s) which rank among the most beloved and influential works of literature in their respective languages – mainly by virtue of cleaving as much as possible to the literal meaning, even at the price of excessive strangeness.

18. The opening chapter of Genesis justifiably served as Exhibit A for the pagan author Longinus’ work On the Sublime. In the Bible, things don’t have to be ideal or perfect in a Platonic sense to inspire awe or reverence.

19. The Bible’s emphasis on mitzvot (“commandments,” duties) basically reinvented religion in the West, turning it away from a primary emphasis on the worship of power and toward an emphasis on the cultivation of individual morality and social justice.

20. The Bible makes room for scathing critiques of kingship and priesthood, and its nebiim (“prophets”) constitute one of the earliest and most important literary and historical models for conscientious objection to institutional power in the West.

21. Because awe is the beginning of wisdom, as the Bible repeatedly suggests, and because spirit and breath are intimately connected, as the Hebrew word ruah (and possibly the very name Yahweh) implies.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Winter weaving

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Weaving: the word is now three-quarters given over to clichéd usage. However, seeing the world as a woven thing – a net, a tapestry, a basket – is a time-honored insight in many traditional cultures, now given renewed force by the discoveries of modern ecologists. And how is it, I wonder, that a stock metaphor can avoid becoming a cliché in oral societies, and can enter song and narrative as consistently and beautifully as a warp thread? Maybe because, as long as it exists only as sound, language can avoid the impression of lifeless objecthood. Or because, in an oral society, metaphor remains close to the ritual context, in which common things are referred to by special terms designed “perhaps… to impress upon the participants that these common things are not at all what they seem to be but possess a hidden meaning and hence a profound ritual efficacy when they are used in the context of the cult,” according to Victor Turner (Revelation and Divination in Ndembu Ritual).

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The Dogon elder Ogotemmeli, as interpreted by French anthropologist Marcel Griaule (Conversations with Ogotemmeli: An Introduction to Dogon Religious Ideas):

At sunrise on the appointed day the seventh ancestor Spirit spat out eighty threads of cotton; these he distributed between his upper teeth which acted as the teeth of a weaver’s reed. In this way he made the uneven threads of a warp. He did the same with his lower teeth to make the even threads. By opening and shutting his jaws the Spirit caused the threads of the warp to make the movements required in weaving. His whole face took part in the work, his nose studs serving as the block, while the stud in his lower lip was a shuttle.

As the threads crossed and uncrossed, the two tips of the Spirit’s forked tongue pushed the thread of the weft to and fro, and the web took shape from his mouth in the breath of the second revealed Word.

For the Spirit was speaking while the work proceeded. As did the Nummo in the first revelation, he imparted his Word by means of a technical process, so that all men could understand. By so doing he showed the identity of material actions and spiritual forces, or rather the need for their co-operation.

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Physicist Fritjof Capra, in a 1997 lecture based on his book The Web of Life:

The systems view of life was formulated first by the organismic biologists. It holds that the essential properties of a living system are properties of the whole, which none of the parts have. They arise from the interactions and relationships between the parts. These properties are destroyed when the system is dissected, either physically or theoretically, into isolated elements. Although we can discern individual parts in any system, these parts are not isolated, and the nature of the whole is always different from the mere sum of its parts. It took many years to formulate this insight clearly, and several key concepts of systems thinking were developed during that period.

The new science of ecology, which began during the 1920s, enriched the emerging systemic way of thinking by introducing a very important concept, the concept of the network. From the beginning of ecology, ecological communities have been seen as consisting of organisms linked together in network fashion through feeding relations. At first, ecologists formulated the concepts of food chains and food cycles, and these were soon expanded to the contemporary concept of the food web.

The “Web of Life” is, of course, an ancient idea, which has been used by poets, philosophers, and mystics throughout the ages to convey their sense of the interwovenness and interdependence of all phenomena. As the network concept became more and more prominent in ecology, systems thinkers began to use network models at all systems levels, viewing organisms as networks of organs and cells, just as ecosystems are understood as networks of individual organisms. This led to the key insight that the network is a pattern that is common to all life. Wherever we see life, we see networks.

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Pioneering participant-observer anthropologist Gladys A. Reichard, in Spider Woman: A Story of Navajo Weavers and Chanters:

Much is said [in the book Indian Blankets and Their Makers] about keeping designs open so that the weaver “does not weave her spirit in.” The idea is still believed by some women. Atlnaba makes many rugs with borders. The tapestry of the Sun’s House has a black border. But at the upper right-hand corner she has one gray thread across the border to serve as a “path.” The little red-background rug she made for me also has a black border, but it is unbroken.

From the discussion and criticisms of my [Navajo] guests this day I gather that many designs with openings, especially those that are irregular are really due to miscalculations and ill-adjustments. They may be later rationalized as “sacred.” One figure [in the book] is, because of its age and texture, a beautiful piece; these modern weavers have nothing but scorn for it. The separate motives are not woven regularly, nor are they well spaced. My critics and teachers refuse to make a rationalization for “holiness.” They continue with their remarks, leafing the pages over and over and back again to begin once more.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

When the clouds lift

1.

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Photography can demystify vision, which is good. It teaches you that the ability to see, really see, depends on a kind of aesthetic muscle that gets stronger with use. It teaches you about grace: that “chance favors the prepared mind,” as Louis Pasteur once put it.

2.

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“As I was walking up the stair, I saw a man that wasn’t there.” Well, O.K., I was actually walking down the road, and it was a tree rather than a man, but you get the idea. The sun sets early in a northeast-facing hollow in January. Right around the next bend, I would drop down into the shadow.

3.

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When I was younger and more idealistic, I thought that a direct, Zen-like seeing of things as they are in themselves, completely free of the veil of interpretations, was the only worthwhile goal of authentic insight. Now, I feel that the more ordinary kind of defamiliarization – the anthropomorphic, “othering” impulse – might be just as important. Last week, at a public lecture by the preeminent historian of American religion, Martin E. Marty, I learned a new word that incorporates both the process of making the familiar unfamiliar and making the unfamiliar familiar: syntectics, from the Greek syn-, together, and ektos, outside or external. It seems to have been coined by educational theorists interested in trying to find ways to teach creativity back in the 70s, and if it remains obscure – well, I can think of some pretty obvious reasons for that! Learning to see as a poet, artist or scientist sees involves a relentless questioning of every cliché, every assumption, every accustomed view. But how else, barring enlightenment, can we retain a sense of wonder and at-homeness in a universe far more complex than we can ever hope to imagine?

4.

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“The sacred is that which repels our advance.” I remember when I first came across this quote in a book by the contemporary philosopher Alphonso Lingis, feeling ridiculously pleased with myself that I had also had this same insight not too many months before. But by now, some four or five years later, I’m afraid this discovery has calcified into another comfortable view. Isn’t the immersion and attempted dissolution of self in other also a sacred thing? Isn’t compassion at least as necessary as syntectics to the perception of holiness? Must the eye or the finger inevitably diminish whatever they touch? Must the mind always grasp in order to understand, or can it learn also to dwell in openness, like an inexhaustible ear?

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Exodus

This entry is part 37 of 42 in the series Antiphony: Paul Zweig

I’ve been reading Paul Zweig, and responding to his poems with poems of my own. This is the twenty-first poem in the third (“Eternity’s Woods”) section of Zweig’s Selected and Last Poems, followed by my response. See here for details on this experiment in responsive reading. I’ll remove Zweig’s poems after a week or two to prevent egregious copyright infringement.

Parting the Sea
by Paul Zweig

Fog hides the shallow ditch, no more
Than a grassy furrow, marking the edge of our land.
[…]

* * * *

Molding the Image
              Aaron speaks

Stay up on the mountain too long, & it changes you.
Droplets of cloud cling to your beard.
Your skin begins to glow like a salamander’s belly.
The occasional groans of the trees start to sound
like the way a crowd should murmur.

Waking up every morning to find the same,
present moment whispering
its incessant demands in your ear –
it makes you intolerable.
You lose touch with the teeming pleasures
that ordinary people crave, because their days are long
& time points in one direction.

Living in the clouds, you lose all perspective,
until one day your worst fantasies
rise up against you:
the luster of gold unfastened from wrist & ankle,
oiled bodies ready for some glistening bullock.
The smashed tablets.
The swords dripping with gore.

Look, I am not that man Moses,
so incoherent with whatever strong emotion
happens to possess him.
God gave me the subtle tongue of a go-between
& the vision to match, bending
in both directions. Look,
the needs of the people are holy to me.
I have been to the mountain, & I can tell you,
there’s nothing up there that’s even faintly human.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

On the other hand

The wind had blown hard out of the east throughout the late-morning snow squall, plastering a half-inch of snow on the east side of every tree trunk. From the driveway at 1:00 p.m. the western ridge shone white, while all the woods on the other side appeared brown.

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I think of this the following morning, around 6:15. I’m coming down through the field after a long, rambling walk in the moonlight. The full moon is still well above the trees, but shadows are beginning to fade. The eastern sky has just begun to lighten beyond the spreading crown of an old white oak at the woods’ edge. I think to myself: a crow or two right now would be nice. But of course it’s too early for that – the owls are still out. Besides, the universe has better things to do than satisfy one man’s dilettantish craving for an aesthetic experience. Which makes me love it all the more, that it continually so confounds my expectations and challenges me to accept whatever happens. I think of all the creatures whose lives are hidden from me, except for the occasional glimpse or a rustle in the walls. I think of brief moments of joy and eternities of needless suffering. These thoughts pass through my mind on well-worn trails, much more quickly than it takes to tell it. Then comes their shadow: But what if it really isn’t like that at all?

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Conditioned by the love of order or an aesthetic impulse, our minds rarely make room for more than one source of light at a time. As I watch the eastern horizon grow slowly more distinct, enough stars remain visible overhead to remind me that, regardless of where the spark originally came from, every being shines for a while on its own. I look around at the weeds and tufts of grass, each with its shadow. But what if it really isn’t like this at all? And I feel the hair stand up on the back of my neck, a moving forest.

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Posted on by Dave Bonta

Defending Creation from the Creationists

Advocates of “Intelligent Design” annoy me in more ways than one. In addition to their willful misrepresentation of science and their political strategy of targeting schools and school boards, they misrepresent religion, too. As Nancey Murphy points out in an interview in the December 27 edition of the Christian Century,

Christians have traditionally understood God to act in two ways: by performing special acts (special providence, signs, miracles) and by constantly upholding all natural processes. The ID movement assumes that God works only in the first way. Therefore, to show that God has acted, the ID movement believes one has to identify an event in which no natural process is involved. This is their point in trying to argue that particular events in the evolutionary process cannot be explained scientifically.

In effect, then, the advocates of ID limit the realm of the sacred to whatever lies beyond human comprehension or rational explanation. Worldwide, few truly religious people from any tradition would make such an elementary mistake. ID advocates are as reductionist as the scientists they critique.

Another thing that annoys me about ID is the slight-of-hand substitution of a designer for a Creator. In the Greek Orthodox confession of faith, God is described as the Poet/Maker of Heaven and Earth – the one who shaped and called things into being – and this view is consistent with the creation stories in Genesis. ID, by contrast, posits an engineer. Note the difference between the ancient and modern myths: world-as-poem, human-as-creation-in-clay implicitly recognizes the essential integrity of beings; world-as-product does not. And if Creation is nothing but product, then of course God is free to violate its integrity at will.

By contrast, Murphy stresses

the view – held by most liberal theologians – that God’s action does not violate the laws of nature. Actually, because I don’t give “laws” the ontological status that many do, I would not speak of violating the laws of nature but of violating the nature of creatures. God creates beings with their own powers and propensities, and does not violate their basic natures in interacting with them.

The interview offers many more such tidbits for those who have access to the magazine in their local public library. Meanwhile, Chris Clarke takes on a creationist biology textbook currently championed by some ID supporters. Again, what really grates isn’t so much the ignorance as the hubris.

The devotee of Teilhard’s noösphere, the extropian with his imagined Manifest Evolutionary Destiny, the well-intentioned Marxist with his inevitability of change, all fall to the same teleological demon, shackled to the Great Chain of Being. And once we set ourselves apart from the rest of “creation,” we begin to resent our ties to the earth. Of what importance is a snail, a rotifer, a tiger? We begin to imagine – and to implement – a world in which we are alone.

And to implement – yes. The poet always remembers what all too many engineers forget: that words and images have immense power, and can create and destroy worlds.